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By Root 1230 0

of assembly”) as a center of prayer, Torah study, and teaching. Unable to make legitimate sacrifices outside the now-destroyed Jerusalem Temple, and eager to distinguish themselves, Jews began to emphasize the Sabbath, circumcision, dietary laws, and other purity rituals that would set their community apart. The notion that their God was not one of many but the only God truly emerged in this era. Jews also accepted the idea that the destruction of Jerusalem did not mean that their God was powerless against or weaker than foreign gods but was punishing Israel for its sins. This focus on personal and national sin—as well as redemption—emerged as the predominant religious theme of the Exile, expressed in prophecy and song.

Among the exiles, the spirit of hope for an eventual return to Jerusalem and the restoration of the Temple took on new fervor. The bleak doom and gloom of the Hebrew Prophets before and during the Exile was usually tempered by hope. Jews began to look for a Messiah, a new leader or savior—an optimistic spirit that yearned for a better life in this world, rather than some afterlife or next life—that would be unique to Judaism.

The other great development of the Exile was the final stages of the composition of the Hebrew scriptures, and during these years in Babylon, the Hebrew Bible gained much of its present shape. The Pentateuch, or Torah, approached the form it now holds, and the history of Israel, from Joshua through Kings, and the earliest prophetic writings were all composed during the Exile.

Despite the images of being enslaved or held captive in Babylon, things couldn’t have been all bad for the exiled Jews. When the Exile was officially ended under Persia’s Cyrus the Great in 538 BCE, only a minority of the Jews in Babylon took advantage of the offer to return to Judah and rebuild Jerusalem (see Ezra, Nehemiah). Many of these people had been living in Babylon for two generations. Intermarriage had become commonplace; many Jews had profited from and were accustomed to life among the pleasures to be had in the splendid ancient city of Babylon—the “Great Whore,” as it was later called. Babylon remained a vibrant, active center for Jewish life and scholarship, the place where the “Babylonian Talmud,” an extensive collection of teachings about the scriptures, was later compiled. The period of the Exile and Return also marks the beginnings of the “Diaspora,” the great dispersal of Jews throughout the Mediterranean world and eventually into Europe. Some Jews had entered official government service, as shown in the cases of Nehemiah, “a cupbearer” to one Persian king, and Mordecai, a Jew who also serves a Persian king (see Esther, page 261).

As Gordon and Rendsburg point out in The Bible and the Ancient Near East,

The success of various Jews in government service is to be explained as follows: since Jews were not bound by close ties to their gentile neighbors, they were free to serve the king without conflicting loyalties. Thus men like Nehemiah or Mordecai were in a position to serve the king well, to attain positions of influence, and to secure royal protection for their coreligionists when necessary. This, of course, stirred up jealousy and hatred so that with the Diaspora appears anti-Semitism. As long as the Hebrews were a nation on their own soil, they had normal feuds and friendships with their neighbors. But anti-Semitism is a product of the Diaspora, as exemplified by Haman, the villain in the Book of Esther (p. 303).

Gordon and Rendsburg’s point is clear from history. Setting aside the Pharaoh’s legendary order to kill the Hebrew babies, the history of the Jewish people before the Exile is essentially no different from that of peoples in other nearby lands. They lived and fought with their neighbors for all the usual reasons. Land, power, ancient feuds. But something changed after the Exile as Jews, compelled to integrate into the non-Jewish world, sought ways to set themselves apart. It is a view that in essence blames Jews for what others did to them, and doesn’t account for other “separate